Witch-King Costume

The Witch-King of Angmar Costume The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingThis is a costume I put together back in 2004/2005 during my senior year in high school. I was doing a practicum at an art studio called Prop Art Studio in downtown Detroit. The company specialized in sculpting large items out of Styrofoam for all sorts of things, including parade floats, sporting events, and business icons. I decided to take this wonderful opportunity to create something I would not have been able to do elsewhere, so I began putting together blueprints of how I was going to sculpt the helmet of the Witch-King from Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The idea came to me because for previous years on Halloween I had gone as a Ringwraith and had already created a set of gauntlets for this. The Witch-King is the strongest of the Nine Ringwraiths and in the 3rd movie stands out from the rest with his evil helmet and distinctive weapons. So, for about 3 months I worked on the helmet while also planning out the flail. It was a great experience and I learned a lot from it, and in the end, I had made a cool costume for homework!

The helm is one of my favorite pieces and has been well-recognized by the Tolkien fan community as being remarkably accurate.

The gauntlets are, believe it or not, nothing more than pieces of carefully cut, bent, and glued pieces of mat board, spray painted silver and textured/aged with washes of blacks and browns.

The flail is ridiculously large, yet proportional to the one used in the film. It consists of Styrofoam (coated in Urethane), wood, plastic, leather, and metal.

The costume in its entirety. Here you can clearly see the colossal size of the flail in proportion to my figure (I'm 6' 2").